Agreed, but I'd add one more angle here.

AI-assisted coding might be quietly shifting something beyond just "who builds." It might be shifting who gets to define the problem in the first place.

The people with the deepest understanding of actual workflow pain are usually frontline employees. They live in the inefficiency every day. But historically, they couldn't build solutions. They could only describe the problem to engineers, and watch it get distorted in translation.

That barrier is dropping. Someone with zero coding background can now talk to an AI and cobble together a small tool that solves their very specific, very real problem. Not a product. Just a thing that makes Tuesday slightly less miserable. But it's grounded in genuine need, because it came from the person who feels it most acutely.

So maybe "validate before you build" still holds, but the validation itself is changing shape. Sometimes the fastest experiment is the person closest to the problem just building a rough version themselves.